And yeah, okay, it’s something to think about. There were also a few other POV characters presented, but I really never got a good handle on why exactly they were in the story, other than to allow the author to present more ideas concerning this condition of immortality and what people might do with it, given the chance. From her perspective, the work will very likely be pointless, but he’s paying her regardless of the outcome. She’s curious and hesitant about Paul and the things he wants, and yet she really needs the money that Paul is offering. And yet, the very thin line of Maria’s story kept me coming back for more. I don’t know that I’ve ever read a science fiction book that spends so much of its time on the science and the presentation of ideas than this one did. He hires Maria to assemble a beginning state called a “Garden of Eden” construct that has the potential to simulate the evolution of an entire planet’s worth of flora and fauna from a single source: the organism she’s been working with for the last several years. If it works, all of their digital copies will be immortal. His plan is to create a simulation large enough for everyone to fit into it, run it for several minutes, and then shut it down. To test this theory, he’s sold the idea to a relatively small number of very wealthy people and promised them the chance to make a virtual copy of themselves, enter it into this virtual world of his, and experience immortality. He’s developed a theory along the way that even short simulations should persist after the hardware simulating construct stops simulating it. He’s made virtual copies of himself multiple times and then placed them within the Autoverse, but, annoyingly, once those copies become self-aware, they can’t handle the fact that they’re a copy and they terminate themselves. Maria likes to spend the overwhelmingly large majority of her waking hours simulating the simplified lifecycle of a single organism as it manipulates simple molecular sugars. Not to mention the world surrounding them. Life, as they say, is complicated, and it only gets more complicated when you deal not only with the emotions and interactions of people, but also with the simulation of everything that makes up said people. It is supported by a complete set of simplified laws that allows this virtual world to exist within the bounds of the computational resources that are available. The Autoverse is a very early representation of an online virtual space where people can visit and exist. Maria Deluca is somewhat of an “Autoverse” addict. The important part in this regard is that there is actually some kind of story here, which you don’t always find in books like these. PERMUTATION CITY ( Amazon) by Greg Egan is a book full of ideas and the presentation of those ideas, but only tells a very small story. So, we might as well read them, if we can handle them, and try to get what we can out of them. Why do they need to present these ideas in the form of fiction? Why not just fill out encyclopedias with these awesome ideas and essays, if the presented construct doesn’t really matter? Still, there are some really cool ideas that get flung around here and there, and I guess authors aren’t exactly going to stop presenting their ideas in these ways. A lot of it just makes me go cross-eyed with annoyance and leaves me wondering why story and character are so often pushed to the back burner in favor of presenting ideas that the author thinks are important. Sometimes I wonder if I’m a mature enough reader these days to understand some of the stuff that science fiction is bringing to the table. I was still in high school and nowhere near mature enough of a reader to pick up half of what science fiction was offering at the time. I’m reaching way back into the vault for this one: 1994.
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